Today (yes, this IS fresh news, even I can’t believe it!) Western Digital announced the shipping of the new Velociraptor drives with the slogan “The world’s fastest SATA hard drive now has twice the capacity”.
- Velociraptor 2.5″
The new Velociraptors actually come in two flavors – 450GB and 600GB. MSRP for ‘em are $299 and $329 respectively. Features are: SATA3, 10000 rpm, 2.5″ size (3.5″ available too), 32MB cache.
- Velociraptor 3.5″
You can view the original press release here.
I’m surprised that they are still releasing these Raptor drives with only 32MB of cache, whereas many mainstream 7200RPM drives these days have 64MB of cache. Good to see the higher capacities on these 10,000 RPM drives though, which are still about 1/3 the price of a comparably-sized SSD.
You shouldn’t be surprised – most of the people who buy Velociraptors use them in RAID arrays, and cache size isn’t an issue there.